Here is a selection of shots of canine A listers from the golden age of Hollywood.

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Lassie was played a male collie called Pal and was a genuine star in that era . Other “star”dogs include : Strongheart, Rin Tin Tin, Jean the Vitagraph dog, Skippy and Terry who played Toto in the Wizard of Oz - all photographed lovingly and professionally and who had a strong fan base of their own. 

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To create these images, photographers in the thirties, forties and fifties used tungsten lights, medium format or large format film cameras that produce a large negative and portraiture lenses with a relatively shallow depth of field. The quality of these pictures is very different to 35mm film photography, which became popular from the 1960s onwards. There are myriad technical reasons for this. Photographers in that era had to know what they were doing too, as mistakes could be costly. Working with light sensitive material and chemicals, those photographers didn’t have the luxury of instantly being able to see what they’d shot . The film emulsions that they used were not terribly forgiving, so metering, processing and printing needed to be done very accurately. Not only were these men and women great photographers and artists,  they were also master printers.